NEWS IN A NUTSHELL

Taranaki Daily News, 1 December 1934, Page 13 (Supplement)

NEWS IN A NUTSHELL

THE WORLD AT A GLANCE

In Japan, China, and Turkey the marriage age for girls is 15 and for boys 16.

Spiders stopped a courthouse clock in Indiana by spinning webs inside the works.

On the average, the external portions of fingernails are completely renewed once every 90 to 110 days.

Fish with hands live in the Sargasso Sea. Possessing fins formed like gripping hands, they cling to the seaweed. A new man-made low temperature of 459.6 degrees below zero Fahrenheit was reached recently by scientists at the Univertity of Leyden. A. permanently plastic clay for modelling can be made by mixing glycerine or turpentine with ordinary day, and adding vaseline to give the desired consistency.

In its trip around the sun, the earth travels approximately 1,600,000 miles a day at the rate of 1100 miles a minute, or eighteen and one-half miles a second.

According to one well-known, wildanimal authority, elephants are the easiest to tame. Adult elephants have been known to be tame enough to be ridden after six days 'of captivity. Van Maanen’s star,, regarded as the smallest in the universe, is also one of the densest. Five tons of its substance cohld, according to one astronomer, be packed comfortably, inside a matchbox.

Shirts grow on trees on the slopes of Cerra Dnida. When needing a new shirt, the Indian strips off a piece of bark, and with holes cut in it for his arms and head, it becomes a ready-to-wear.

A man’s first wife left him forty years ago because the union had proved childless; he lived to be the father of twentynine children. He died recently by his own hand at Pemberton (Western Australia).

Thanks to a car smash, Miss Alice Murphy, a nineteen-year-old dumb Brisbane girl, has had her speech miraculously restored. Picking herself up from the wreckage, she was astounded at her own sudden flow of language.

On the average, women live longer than men, enjoying 61 years of life to man’s 58. The general span of life is increasing, however. In Queen Elizabeth’s time, 20 years constituted the average lifetime.

Because early chemists thought all acids contained oxygen, the gas was given the name oxygen, which means “acid former.” Later it was discover-, ed-that all acid contained hydrogen, not oxygen.

One of the oldest treatments for burns and one which again has come to the fore consists of bathing the skin with ' a strong brew of tea. The tannic acfd in the tea is credited with soothing, scar-eliminating qualities. After a careful study two UriScd States Geological Survey scientists recently listed the following elements in the order of their abundance: Oxygen, silicon, aluminium, iron, calcium, sodium, potassium, and magnesium. The perfect poison, whose secret was lost by the Chinese 2000 years ago, has been rediscovered by Professor Osborne, of Melbourne. Made from frog’s skin, it leaves no traces, and yields no clues to chbmical. analysis. Penguins may give the appearance of staid stay-at-homes, but actually they travel extensively—at least the Adelis and Emperor penguins of the Antarctic, do. Stones found in the stomachs /Of these birds indicate migration of 350 400 miles.

The walking gold-mine is the name bestowed on Charles Masson, of Central British Columbia. He has a large nugget for a tie-pin, three rough nuggets attached to a heavy gold chain across his chest, and about thirty nuggets in his pockets. He asserts that while he trusts his friends, he cannot trust banks. The system of submitting all cases to a court in the form of a written brief existed in Egypt about 5000 years ago. One such brief in the Berlin' Museum covers litigation between an heir and an executor; it is believed to be of that age and the oldest document of ite kind in existence. i

Although lighter than aluminium, duralumin is one of the strongest of the aluminium, alloys. It consists of approximately of 9.4 per cent, aluminium, 4 per cent, copper, 0.5 per cent, magnesium, 0.5 per cent manganese, and smaller amounts of iron and silicon.

Under normal conditions, the human heart makes about 4320 strokes an hour to pump 15 gallons of blood through the veins. In the course of the average lifetime it makes approximately 2,592,000,000 strokes to deliver 9,000,000 gallons.

Hot springs and geysers such as those in the Yellowstone National Park are nothing more than steam-heated springs. For the most part, their water consists of ordinary surface rain and snow water, the actual heat being supplied by steam seeping up from buried lava beds beneath the earth. On the question, who was the first man to travel under water in a submarine, honours seem divided between William Bourne (English) in 1580 and Cornelius Van Drebble (Dutch) in 1624. Credit for the first wartime submarine goes to David Bushnell (American). Completed in 1775, it was used in the Revolution when an American seaman operating it tried unsuccessfully to attach an underwater bomb to the hull of the British man-or-war Eagle.

According to statistics compiled by life insurance companies, more deaths from electrical shock occur in the summer than in the winter. Any effect of the weather on the protency of electricity is not blamed for this condition, however. More likely it is due to the fact that the average person generally has a coating of perspiration on his skin during the summer months. This makes the skin less resistant’ to electricity so that a moderately powerful shock that would not cause death in winter may be fatal in summer.

The population of Great Britain eats 152 eggs per head each year. That is less than half an egg a day. Canadians eat more than 300 eggs a year, or nearly one egg a day for each adult. The total production of eggs in the United Kingdom is 4,800,000,000 a year. It imports mainly, from foreign countries 2,200,000,000 costing £7,300,000. About half a million people are engaged in the egg and poultry industry. Britain has the following egg imports:—From Denmark, 748,000,000; from Poland, 202,000,000; from Holland, 120,000,000; from China, 170,000,000. From China it imports also ’ 591.000 cwt. of liquid or frozen eggs, costing £1,500,000.